What on earth is happening in my brain? I swear that the days are getting shorter – that time is speeding up. Why, it seems like only yesterday that I was putting out the bins, not a week ago; last week that I was doing the monthly update of the website, not a month ago; last year that I took those photos, not three years ago.
Why is it that I only managed to get out the reminder email for today’s class hours beforehand, when I’d planned to do so all weekend?
I do seem to have a problem with time – my family would agree and suggest it is probably genetic, as my mother had this problem too.
However, something new is happening. I seem to be ‘receiving’ more triggers and experiencing strange and more frequent moments of ‘déjà vu’.
Recently, for ‘As Time Goes By’, I wrote about a friend becoming pregnant ‘out of wedlock’ during our first year as teachers at a small rural high school near the South Australian border in 1970. After sharing this story, I had periodic 'flashbacks' to living in a sparsely furnished prefabricated flat opposite the school and vividly remembered the loneliness I felt then. With my only geographically close family member on holiday in France, the sense of distance from family, the feelings of homesickness I experienced so deeply almost five decades ago, had reemerged.
Not long after, a member of the Tech Savvy Family Research class showed me a family she was seeking to find on ancestry.com. The realisation dawned that in the 1970's I had been quite close to two family members she was looking for. Perusing an electoral roll on ancestry.com, I recognised an address I had visited often. Suddenly I was visiting my dear friends again. Searching out photos of the family from my albums to show her at the next class, I found myself transported back to that time, watching ‘video replays’ in my head of ‘times gone by’.
Memories have also been triggered by people from my childhood reappearing in my life in Benalla through U3A. Geraldine McCorkell (nee Smith) brings up memories of growing up in Clayton after the war. I ‘knew of’ Geraldine and my father often spoke of “Morrie Smith”, Geraldine’s father. Cheryl Turner reminds me of my years and friends at Malvern Girls Secondary School in Melbourne; Pauline Bailey and local artist Ivan Durrant of my ‘matric’ year at Oakleigh High School.
In reality, memory triggers seem to be coming in from all directions – for example, my sister's photographs of Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona posted last week brought back a stirring of memories of my own visit to Barcelona in 1977, almost half a century ago now.
Is it part of ageing? Triggers to memories do seem to be occurring more often, acting like a lens opening up on that time in my life. The vividness of the memories evoked is sharp, the contexts elaborated to include textures, tones, touch.
Is something happening in my brain? Perhaps there a biological function behind all this, a purpose behind losing short term memory but keeping long term memory?
I am left wondering, not only why so many triggers are ‘being received’, but why the memories evoked are enveloped in déjà vu, ‘aura’ like moments in time?
…'My goodness', I’d better ‘snap out of it’ and ‘get a move on’! Our next ‘As Time Goes By’ session is only hours away!
Once again, my sense of time is awry; once again I haven’t edited my story to 500 words as I should have! and...
Once again…. I’m… ‘just in time’…
Beverley Lee
May 2019
Why is it that I only managed to get out the reminder email for today’s class hours beforehand, when I’d planned to do so all weekend?
I do seem to have a problem with time – my family would agree and suggest it is probably genetic, as my mother had this problem too.
However, something new is happening. I seem to be ‘receiving’ more triggers and experiencing strange and more frequent moments of ‘déjà vu’.
Recently, for ‘As Time Goes By’, I wrote about a friend becoming pregnant ‘out of wedlock’ during our first year as teachers at a small rural high school near the South Australian border in 1970. After sharing this story, I had periodic 'flashbacks' to living in a sparsely furnished prefabricated flat opposite the school and vividly remembered the loneliness I felt then. With my only geographically close family member on holiday in France, the sense of distance from family, the feelings of homesickness I experienced so deeply almost five decades ago, had reemerged.
Not long after, a member of the Tech Savvy Family Research class showed me a family she was seeking to find on ancestry.com. The realisation dawned that in the 1970's I had been quite close to two family members she was looking for. Perusing an electoral roll on ancestry.com, I recognised an address I had visited often. Suddenly I was visiting my dear friends again. Searching out photos of the family from my albums to show her at the next class, I found myself transported back to that time, watching ‘video replays’ in my head of ‘times gone by’.
Memories have also been triggered by people from my childhood reappearing in my life in Benalla through U3A. Geraldine McCorkell (nee Smith) brings up memories of growing up in Clayton after the war. I ‘knew of’ Geraldine and my father often spoke of “Morrie Smith”, Geraldine’s father. Cheryl Turner reminds me of my years and friends at Malvern Girls Secondary School in Melbourne; Pauline Bailey and local artist Ivan Durrant of my ‘matric’ year at Oakleigh High School.
In reality, memory triggers seem to be coming in from all directions – for example, my sister's photographs of Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona posted last week brought back a stirring of memories of my own visit to Barcelona in 1977, almost half a century ago now.
Is it part of ageing? Triggers to memories do seem to be occurring more often, acting like a lens opening up on that time in my life. The vividness of the memories evoked is sharp, the contexts elaborated to include textures, tones, touch.
Is something happening in my brain? Perhaps there a biological function behind all this, a purpose behind losing short term memory but keeping long term memory?
I am left wondering, not only why so many triggers are ‘being received’, but why the memories evoked are enveloped in déjà vu, ‘aura’ like moments in time?
…'My goodness', I’d better ‘snap out of it’ and ‘get a move on’! Our next ‘As Time Goes By’ session is only hours away!
Once again, my sense of time is awry; once again I haven’t edited my story to 500 words as I should have! and...
Once again…. I’m… ‘just in time’…
Beverley Lee
May 2019
